Review: Bill T. Jones Creates a Dance for America, Right Now

“Curriculum III: People, Places & Things,” the latest premiere by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, starts with a defiant exclamation. The word “No,” projected on the back wall of the stage at New York Live Arts, grows larger and larger, like a scream getting louder, joined by görüntü of flames and the crackling sounds of fire — presumably the fire this time.

What is this work defying? That becomes clear as dancers, hooded in black, writhe on the floor while a surveillance drone hovers over them. They appear blown about by the wash of its rotors, but the drone is actually toy-sized, and to stop it, all a dancer has to do is stand up and take it in hand. (To make mühlet we understand, this happens again near the end of the 100-minute show.)

This is America. This is now. The 10 members of the cast are each introduced with a mug shot and a list of characteristics: name, age, gender, race, ethnicity. Throughout “Curriculum III,” they take turns telling the story of their lineage, all but one finishing with the tag line “I am an American.”

It adds up to a rich collection of American diversity: roots in Hessian mercenaries in the Revolutionary War and Cape Verdean barbers in Brewster, Mass.; in Jamaican nannies and immigrants from Morocco in the 19th century; in the unfashionable category “generic white.” The stories refract many versions of the American dream, even in that of the exception, Huiwang Zhang. He is not yet American, he says, but his children are.

Because “Curriculum III” is a dance work, it isn’t only words. Its central scene — returned to over and over, stopped and started, reversed and reoriented — shows what seems to be an airport or a bus terminal. The dancers line up with backpacks and wheeled suitcases, then walk or run around the perimeter of the stage, sometimes amiably, sometimes while tussling. Some are left behind, some left out.

And there is more conventional dancing, too. Much of the choreography — credited to Jones, who conceived and directed the work, as well as the company and Janet Wong — looks like retreads of past works by Jones, or it relies on trademark devices like dancers rapidly lining up and peeling off one by one.

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Dancers also move as they talk. This is a skill at which Jones has always been a rare master. (At New York Live Arts, the “Curriculum III” program is alternating with his latest talk-and-dance solo, “Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin… the Un-Ailey?,” created for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Alvin Ailey exhibition last year.) His dancers, all top-shelf movers, struggle with the speaking part in a spectrum of awkwardness from unobtrusively flat to slightly embarrassing or reminiscent of high-school theatrics.

The dancing and speaking are seldom directly related. The effect of the combination is usually a postmodern distancing, though in Zhang’s case, his leaps heighten the ordeal of questioning at ports of entry, and Danielle Marshall’s balancing of a plastic water bottle on her head deepens her story.

“Curriculum III” has a highly sophisticated composition overall, revealing as it goes the meaning of aspects that might at first have appeared random. Robert Wierzel’s lighting, Wong’s görüntü design and sound by David Van Tieghem and John Oswald are all expert. But as in many works by Jones, the abstraction and the agitprop seem at cross purposes, one undermining the other.

Other than “America the Beautiful,” soulfully sung by Marshall, the songs come from Jones’s youth, as reminders of past struggles or fragments shored up against the ruin of the present. We hear Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1965) in renditions by Dylan, Nina Simone and Marshall, repeating the lyrics “You better go back to from where you came” and “I do believe I’ve had enough.”

The glorious uplift of the Impressions’ “Keep On Pushing” (1964) is cut with — or defiled by — audio of President Trump berating the president of Ukraine and smugly asserting “We’re just getting started.” The words “hello” and “no,” repeated throughout the show, are smashed together as “Hell no!,” a chant that Jones, after the bows on opening night, angrily exhorted the audience to join.

“Don’t be puppets,” he yelled, preaching to the choir an urgent message that “Curriculum III” makes diffuse.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

Through May 24 at New York Live Arts; newyorklivearts.org.